This dissertation is an engaged critique of peacebuilding discourses and approaches in South Sudan with regard to women's exclusion and resulting lack of representation in the peacebuilding arena. The study investigates how women's exclusion in the peacebuilding process is historically constructed, structurally constrained, and socially organized in ways that limit and enable particular identities, individual capacities, and social forms. The study applies a critical feminist view to the work of two women's peacebuilding agencies and a critical autoethnographic analysis of experience in South Sudan and interviews with South Sudanese women. Based on this critique, the study explores the question of how approaches to peacebuilding by women-led organizations perpetuate exclusion of grassroots women from peacebuilding processes in South Sudan. To answer the question, the study interrogates major contextual levels, structural processes and systemic ideologies, and the impact of these on approaches to peacebuilding. The study explores how women-led peacebuilding agencies disengage their approaches from the context on the ground and operate from a dominant ideological framework that reproduces patriarchy and exclusion of women. The study concludes with a description of elements in a tentative systemic model of engaged and embodied, women inclusive, peacebuilding informed by a search for moral imagination (Lederach, 2005) and personal account of a peace proactivist.

Decades of conflicts and persecution have driven millions from their homes in all parts of the northeast African country of Sudan. Many thousands more have been enslaved as human spoils of war. In their own words, the narrators of Out of Exile recount their lives before their displacement, the reasons for their flight, and their hopes to someday return home. Included are the stories of: ABUK: a native of South Sudan now living in Boston, who survived ten years as a slave after being captured by an Arab militia. MARCY and ROSE: best friends, who have spent the vast majority of their lives in a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya. They remember almost nothing of their former homes in Sudan. MATHOK: who struggled to find opportunities as a refugee in Cairo, but eventually fell into a world of gangs and violence.

What happened after Africa's biggest country split in two? When South Sudan ran up its flag in July 2011, two new nations came into being. In South Sudan a former rebel movement faces colossal challenges in building a new country. At independence it was one of the least developed places on earth, after decades of conflict and neglect. The '"rump state'", Sudan, has been debilitated by devastating civil wars, including in Darfur, and lost a significant part of its territory, and most of its oil wealth, after the divorce from the South. In the years after separation, the two Sudans dealt with crippling economic challenges, struggled with new and old rebellions, and fought each other along their disputed border. Benefiting from unsurpassed access to the politicians, rebels, thinkers and events that are shaping the Sudans, Copnall draws a compelling portrait of two misunderstood countries. A Poisonous Thorn in Our Hearts argues that Sudan and South Sudan remain deeply interdependent, despite their separation. It also diagnoses the political failings that threaten the future of both countries. The author puts the turmoil of the years after separation into a broader context, reflecting the voices, hopes and experiences of Sudanese and South Sudanese from all walks of life.

This volume has detailed reports produced by consultants, governments, NGOs and UN and International Aid Organizations. There is also an inventory of NGO and UN organizations working in the region and a chronology of events to put the bibliographical information in context.